My favorite entry in tomorrow’s St. Patrick’s Day parade is a musical group whose members don’t wear a lot of green and don’t play bagpipes.

Heck, they’re not even Irish.

(Oops. I forgot — everybody’s Irish on St. Patrick’s Day in Savannah.)

Anyway, my favorite entry is this group whose 20-plus members aren’t Celtic but who embody the Irish propensity for merrymaking on the Big Green Day. It’s Barabbas and the Tribe, a Junkanoo band from the Bahamas, and they’ll be carrying on and making their joyful noise in the parade for the ninth consecutive year.

Clad in outlandishly colorful, mummer-like costumes and playing an aggregation of animal-skin drums, cowbells, scrapers, mouth whistles and well-used brass instruments, the Tribe and its leader, Quinton “Barabbas” Woodside, are impossible to ignore when they’re on the march — which they call “rushin’.”

Their music — described by Barabbas as “up-tempo” and “coming from an African tribal beat” — is like an aphrodisiac for your feet. You can’t keep still while Barabbas and his tribesmen are gyrating by.

“Our music makes a sad moment happy in a second,” said Barabbas, a lifelong resident of the island of Nassau who turns 50 later this month. “Even if you’re angry, you’ve got to move.

“It’s the heartbeat of the people.”

The Tribe’s numerous appearances in St. Patrick’s parades in Savannah and on Tybee Island are due to the efforts of Jack Flanigan and his former wife, Belinda, who own the Crab Shack restaurant on Tybee.

Jack met Barabbas some 12 years ago while Flanigan was at the Atlantis resort near Nassau “looking for Bahamian music to put into CDs.” Jack discussed his quest with a bartender at the resort who happened to be Woody Woodside, the brother of Barabbas.

“I met Woody, and he took me to Barabbas,” Jack said. “We became friends,”

Ten years ago, Belinda brought Barabbas and some of his musicians to Tybee for Jack’s birthday, which is in August.

“We told them, ‘Ya’ll need to come for St. Patrick’s Day,” said Belinda, “and they’ve been coming for nine years.”

During their visits, the band performs nightly at the Crab Shack. This time around, Barabbas and the Tribe arrived on March 9, went rushin’ the following day in Tybee’s St. Patrick’s Heritage Celebration parade, and will be on the island through this Sunday.

Their shows at the Crab Shack, in the form of extended marches throughout the restaurant, take place at 6 and 8:30 p.m.

Junkanoo began in the 17th or 18th century when British planters in the Bahamas gave their slaves a few days off during Christmastime. The slaves made costumes and celebrated with dancing and music harkening back to their west African roots. Many sources trace the origin of the term Junkanoo to a slave leader named Johnny Canoe.

These days, Junkanoo festivals are held on Nassau and other islands on Boxing Day — the day after Christmas — and on New Year’s Day. Numerous groups of as many as 1,000 participants march during the festivals, competing for cash prizes.

Quinton “Barabbas” Woodside was introduced to Junkanoo at the age of 4 when he “got in the way” of cousins making costumes. They put him “in a corner,” where he helped in the work.

“I was 7 or 8 when I started making little plastic drums and marching up and down in the yard,” he said.

He joined a junior Junkanoo group and eventually, as an adult, wound up in leadership roles with several prestigious Junkanoo organizations.

In 1998, he formed Barabbas and the Tribe, a relatively small group that doesn’t compete, performs for special events and draws many of its members from the larger Junkanoo outfits.

Woodside also founded and operates Junkanoo World Museum, a cultural arts center on Nassau, where he fosters community-service projects involving young people working with the elderly and the disabled.

In case you’re wondering about his unique nickname, it stems from his younger days as a hotel busboy. He was assigned to a specific waiter but often went to work early and helped other servers set up their stations. One day his waiter, needing help, yelled “Give me Barabbas!” — a reference to Gospel accounts involving the execution of Jesus Christ and the pardoning of a criminal named Barabbas. Those accounts state that a crowd chose the criminal over Jesus by calling out “Give us Barabbas!”